From a gaming forum thread on the atmospherics of loneliness and isolation:

I searched for Threshold Kids and this happened:

Apparently the latest controversial morsel on the FFVII remake is:

I found a Usenet post from 2004 about a bug in Thief: Deadly Shadows. A player, trying to open a chest, instead got engulfed by it and ended up inside.

Apparently the in thing for Americans of about my age, neither quite Gen. X nor what people have in mind when they stereotype Millennials, is to style themselves the Oregon Trail Generation (after the educational computer game, not the 19th Century pioneers, who are conveniently no longer around to complain). So what does that make Brits …

A while back I was contracted to write a chapter for a textbook in philosophy of technology, on the theme of video games and virtual reality. Owing to publishing lead times, the book is due out next April, but my chapter has been drafted and revised already, back when it was clear I ought to mention …

Heritage gets everywhere. The story of Pillars of Eternity begins when trespass near an ancient and sanctified site arouses a violent reaction from the local population, who have appointed themselves the ruins’ guardians in place of their long-vanished builders; and now the game’s had me wondering what to do about an artefact taken from such ruins, …

I’ve been correcting the typesetters’ proofs for Getting ‘Virtual’ Wrongs Right, which is basically an extended gripe at the way in which loose talk of ‘virtual murder’ and the like managed to migrate from tabloid headlines to ethics papers. (The final, typeset version will be paywalled somewhere; I’m more sanguine than usual about this aspect of …

Two old, two new, and please don’t mention sprite colour limitations.

There’s something peculiarly beguiling, perhaps because also frustrating, about mysteries hidden in plain sight. The fourth Kryptos code might be the most brazen, flaunting its undeciphered self on a sculpture outside the C.I.A. headquarters. Then there are the texts that might be meaningful: someone might verify tomorrow that the Voynich Manuscript can be deciphered to produce …